India and Amazon Tie Contrived Knots
March 8, 2021
Small businesses in India have been accusing Amazon of shady business practices for some time. Now, a report from Reuters has exposed the company’s strategy to circumvent Indian regulators. Fossbytes discusses the report in, “The Great Amazon India Document Leak: All You Need to Know.” We’re told one internal presentation obtained by Reuters blatantly urged workers to “test the boundaries of what is allowed by law.” Not a good look, Amazon. Journalist Manik Berry writes:
“According to the report by Reuters, Amazon has been bending rules just enough to not get into legal trouble in India. For instance, the Indian FDI (foreign direct investment) rules prevent Amazon or other e-commerce retailers to control inventory in India. This means Amazon can be the platform where buyers meet sellers but it cannot control how the sellers sell things. However, the report says Amazon found a way to control the inventory. …
“Amazon’s internal documents reveal the creation of a ‘Special Merchant (SM)’ in 2014. This special merchant, namely Cloudtail, is one of the biggest sellers on Amazon, accounting for over 40% of the platform’s sales. Cloudtail was created as a collaboration between Amazon and the Infosys founder, N.R. Narayana Murthy. Amazon wanted it to control more than 40% of sales on Amazon India. This would’ve made it a $1 billion business, whose profit would, indirectly, go to Amazon. What’s alarming is that Cloudtail is created and controlled by Amazon, which means it directly flouted the Indian FDI rules.”
The report also reveals that about a third of Amazon India’s sales come from only 33 sellers. It seems the company has been providing those select few with support and promotion, giving them an unfair advantage. The leaked docs suggest this practice is resulting in losses for the other 66%. For more details, we direct readers to the extensive Reuters article.
Amazon is still the Bezos bulldozer. Perhaps the new driver is a streak of cleverness lacking when Mr. Bezos pulled the levers?
Cynthia Murrell, March 8, 2021
Amazon: Putting Eyes on Humans
February 17, 2021
Amazon may have a new driver at the controls of the Bezos bulldozer, but the big orange machine keeps pushing monitoring technology. “Amazon’s Driver Monitoring App Is an Invasive Nightmare” does not like the system the online bookstore uses to keep an eye on human delivery drivers. The write up states:
Mentor is made by eDriving, which describes the app on its website as a “smartphone-based solution that collects and analyzes driver behaviors most predictive of crash risk and helps remediate risky behavior by providing engaging, interactive micro-training modules delivered directly to the driver in the smartphone app.”
From my tumble down shack in rural Kentucky, the Bezos bulldozer seems to be using technology from an outfit called eDriving. There are several options available to the online bookstore. Amazon can continue to pay eDriving. Amazon can clone the system. Amazon can acquire the company, people, or technology.
Based on my on-going research into Amazon’s surveillance capabilities, the enhanced cameras, the online hook to the AWS mothership, and the use of third-parties to nudge monitoring forward is still in its early days. Amazon moves slowly and in a low profile way. Most law enforcement and intelligence organizations observe Amazon the way a tourist does a turtle in the Galapagos: Check out where the turtle is after breakfast and then note that the darned thing moved behind a rock a few fee away by noon. No big deal. Turtles move, right? Turtles are not gazelles, right?
Several observations:
- Amazon chugs along in a sprightly manner behind the curtain separating public use of a system like Mentor
- Amazon time makes it difficult for some observers to note significant change in a system or technology
- The trick to figuring out where Amazon is headed in surveillance systems is to step back and observe the suite of systems.
What does one learn?
How about Amazon as the plumbing for many of the widely used policeware and intelware systems? Who knew that Palantir Technologies is a good Amazon customer? Maybe not IBM which inked a deal with the chipper Denver based “ride ‘em cowboy” policeware firm.
How useful would Amazon’s monitoring technology be if connected to a Palantir content intake system? My guess is that it would be quite useful, and it would require the Amazon cloud to work. What’s that mean for cloud competitors like Google, IBM, and Microsoft?
Amazon’s policeware and intelware approach is a lock in dream. Where could a Mentor-type system be useful to investigators?
Sorry. I can’t think of a single use case. Ho ho ho.
Stephen E Arnold, February 17, 2021
Amazon AWS EC2 Pricing
February 11, 2021
Amazon AWS makes many things simple: Off the shelf machine learning models, buying cables, and spending money. If you want to get a sense for the complexity of pricing at AWS, take a look at “EC2 Instances.Info: Easy Amazon ED2 Instance Comparison.” The effort required to compile the table was significant. In addition to the data structured by EC service, region, and other tags — there’s the splash page table itself. Impressive. For those with some financial and technical expertise, a new job category now exists: Figuring out AWS pricing for a project and then determining how to minimize costs over time. From the Amazon one click patent to this pricing inventory. How far has Amazon driven the Bezos bulldozer? A long way.
Stephen E Arnold, February 11, 2021
What Is Next for Amazon Netradyne?
February 4, 2021
I noted the “real” news outfit CNBC story “Amazon Is Using AI-Equipped Cameras in Delivery Vans and Some Drivers Are Concerned about Privacy.” The use case is monitoring drivers. I have heard that some drivers work like beavers. Other comments suggest that some drivers play fast and loose with their time. These are lazy beavers. Other drivers misplace packages. These are crafty beavers. Another group driver like the route through the subdivision is a race. These are thrill-loving beavers. The Netradyne Driveri gizmo provides a partial solution with benefits; for example, imagery. My thought is that the Netradyne gizmo can hook into the Amazon AWS mother ship for a range of interesting features and functions. Maybe the data would be of use to those engaged in Amazon’s public sector work; for example, policeware services and solutions?
The story states:
Amazon is using an AI-powered camera made by Netradyne, a San Diego-based start-up that was founded in 2015 by two former senior Qualcomm employees. The camera, called Driveri, has four lenses that capture the road, the driver, and both sides of the vehicle.
I want to step away from the Netradyne and ask a few questions to which I don’t have answers at this time:
- Will Amazon learn from the Netradyne deployment what product enhancements to include in the “son of Netradyne”?
- What if a vehicle is equipped with multiple Netradyne type devices and shares these data with Amazon’s public sector partners and customers?
- What if Amazon’s drone routing surveillance technology is adapted to function with Amazon delivery mechanisms; that is, robot carts, lockers at the local store, trunk centric delivery, Ring doorbells, etc.?
The drivers are the subjects of a Silicon Valley style A-B test. My hunch is that there will be further smart camera developments either by AWS itself, AWS and a partner, or a few startups taking advantage of AWS technology to provide a platform for an application of the Netradyne learnings.
Who competes with Amazon AWS in this sector? Google, Microsoft, got any ideas? Sure, you do.
Stephen E Arnold, February 4, 2021
Amazon: Dark Pattern? Of Course Not
January 28, 2021
Consumer advocates have noticed Amazon is not one to make it very simple to stop paying it money. Yahoo Finance shares the (paywalled) Bloomberg article, “Amazon Makes It Too Hard to Cancel Prime, Groups Tell FTC.” Amazon Prime is the company’s $119/ year membership that allows one to get free shipping and freely stream music and videos, among other benefits. We’re reminded the program has contributed greatly to the company’s dominance of the worldwide online retail market. Writers Matt Day and Ben Brody report:
“In a letter to the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday, a group led by Public Citizen said the steps required to cancel Prime ‘are designed to unfairly and deceptively undermine the will of the consumer,’ and may violate FTC rules as well as other consumer protection laws. The letter draws on a complaint by Norway’s consumer protection agency, which on Thursday asked Norwegian regulators to determine whether Amazon violated local law. … The report by Forbrukerrådet, Norway’s state-backed consumer protection agency, documents how Amazon riddles the process with ‘dark patterns,’ or manipulative techniques, including steps that nestle the choice to leave in between other options to abort the whole process or maintain their membership. The group also produced a video that demonstrates how a user who wants to cancel Prime might accidentally click buttons that actually keep them in the program. While complaints routinely land at the FTC with little action, at least one of the parties involved in Thursday’s letter, the Center for Digital Democracy, has been able to push commissioners in the past.”
For its part, Amazon insists it is “clear and easy” to cancel the membership. Amazon is already going through a congressional antitrust investigation and probes by the FTC, European Commission, and other regulators. The shift into the new presidential administration is unlikely to help the company’s position. If Amazon suddenly makes it easier to cancel one’s Prime subscription, we need not wonder why.
Cynthia Murrell, January 28, 2021
The AWS Bulldozer and Elasticsearch: Can the Rubber Trees Grow Back?
January 22, 2021
In 1955 or 1956, I lived in Campinas, Brazil. My father worked from RG LeTourneau. He had the delightful job of setting up a factory to produce what were then called sheep foot rollers. Most people are not aware of the function of a sheep’s foot roller. Let me explain.
Hoot a D9 or other comparable bulldozer to two or more sheep foot rollers. Drive the bulldozer, scraper, or other heavy duty machine through a grassy field, a jungle or grassland. Crush and smash the trees, plants, and animals. What’s in the wake of the snorting and roaring yellow beast is a surface almost ready for paving. That’s right. The sheep foot rollers made the Trans-Amazon highway a reality.
What did the fleets of earth moving machinery do to the Hevea brasiliensis, a species of rubberwood. Well, in the case of highway deforestation, the elastic plants did not fare particularly well.
What does this slice of my life have to do with search, retrieval, log file analysis, information access, and other content related activities?
“Stepping Up for a Truly Open Source Elasticsearch” reminded me of the impact of the bulldozers and the sheep foot roller combos. The write up explains:
We launched Open Distro for Elasticsearch in 2019 to provide customers and developers with a fully featured Elasticsearch distribution that provides all of the freedoms of ALv2-licensed software. Open Distro for Elasticsearch is a 100% open source distribution that delivers functionality practically every Elasticsearch user or developer needs, including support for network encryption and access controls. In building Open Distro, we followed the recommended open source development practice of “upstream first.”
Who is the “we” driving what I think of as a digital bulldozer? Why none other than Amazon.
I wrote about Elastic search’s difficult decision to try to stave off the building of an information superhighway directly over the Elastic NV buildings in Amsterdam. You can find that essay in “Enterprise Search: Flexible and Stretchy. Er, No.”
I think my observation that it was too late for Elastic NV. Perhaps the company can find a way to avoid the Bezos bulldozer. The sentiments about the virtues of open source software echo through the Amazon blog post and the Elastic NV explanation of its decision to be a different flavor of open source goodness.
Put that handwaving aside.
The function of the bulldozer and the sheep foot roller is to build a new trail. That trail leads to Amazon AWS revenues, service offerings, and integrated functionality.
Vrrooom. Too bad about those hyacinth macaws. My father and Mr. LeTourneau were not environmentalists. Neither was particularly elastic either. Both loved the results of big yellow machines dragging sheep foot rollers across the virgin landscape.
There’s a lesson here. The Trans-Amazon highway is visible from the international space station. The rubber trees and other trivialities are not.
Stephen E Arnold, January 22, 2021
Enterprise Search: Flexible and Stretchy. Er, No.
January 21, 2021
Enterprise search, the utility service, thrills users and information technology professionals alike. There are quite a few search and retrieval vendors chasing revenue. Frankly I have given up trying to keep track of outfits like Luigi’s Box, Yext (yes, enterprise search!), and quite a few repackagers of Lucene; e.g., IBM, Attivio, Voyager Search, and more. There are some proprietary outfits as well.
Then there is the Compass Search sibling Elastic and its Elasticsearch. Open source search makes a great deal of sense to:
- Companies wanting a no cost or low cost way to provide search and retrieval-type functionality to an application
- Penny pinchers who want “the community” to fix bugs so that cash is freed up to lease fancy cars, receive bonuses, and focus on more important software features which can be offered for a fee and a license handcuff
- Competitors who want to provide a familiar environment to those with cash to spend and wave the magic wand of open source in front of young believers who think proprietary software is a crime against humanity.
The history of Elasticsearch and Amazon reaches back to the era when Lucid Works (né Lucid Imagination) lost some staff to Amazon’s Burlingame, California, office. That was the bell which sounded when the Bezos bulldozer decided A9 was not enough. Sure, A9 works but the folks from the Lucene/Solr outfit would map the route from A9 to a more open, folksy world of open source search.
The open source version of Lucene was the beating heart of Elastic, the now public company.
Then Amazon does what Amazon does: The company shifted the bulldozer into gear and went for open source search developers who could seamlessly (sort of) move into the newly blazed path to AWS. Once inside, the fruits of the thousand plus services, features, and functions were just a click away. Policeware vendors, start ups, and some big outfits followed the Bezos bulldozer. The updated IBM slogan reads, “Nobody gets fired for buying AWS.”
Elastic was upset.
“Amazon: NOT OK – Why We Had to Change Elastic Licensing” picks up this story and explains where Elastic fits into the world crafted by the Bezos bulldozer.
The write up explains:
Our license change is aimed at preventing companies from taking our Elasticsearch and Kibana products and providing them directly as a service without collaborating with us.
Elastic’s essay notes:
We think that Amazon’s behavior is inconsistent with the norms and values that are especially important in the open source ecosystem. Our hope is to take our presence in the market and use it to stand up to this now so others don’t face these same issues in the future.
The essay concludes:
I believe in the core values of the Open Source Community: transparency, collaboration, openness. Building great products to the benefit of users across the world. Amazing things have been built and will continue to be built using Elasticsearch and Kibana. And to be clear, this change most likely has zero effect on you, our users. And no effect on our customers that engage with us either in cloud or on premises.
Several observations:
- Commercial behemoths like Amazon use open source the way my neighbor burns firewood, old carpets, and newspapers. The goal is to optimize available cash.
- Amazon’s move into Elastic’s territory began more than five years ago. Amazon does kill off loser products like health and food delivery but it keeps others in tall cotton when it pays off.
- Those completing [a] Amazon certification, [b] partner indoctrination, or [c] inputs from free or low cost Amazon training arrive ready to do the search thing Amazon’s way.
Net net: Beyond Search understands Elastic’s anguish and actions. Perhaps the license shift and the assumptions about open source are unlikely to stand up to the Bezos bulldozer? Open source Elasticsearch is a bargain. It may be tough to compete with free plus discounts for AWS goodies and other Amazon benefits. Legal or illegal, fair or unfair, open source or closed source — the bulldozer grinds forward.
Stephen E Arnold, January 21, 2021
AWS Offers Multicloud Services Without Fanfare
January 21, 2021
One problem with cloud offerings is when a service does not sold for one operating system, but not another. AWS usually brags about its accomplishments, but Protocol said, “AWS Quietly Enters The Multicloud Era.”
AWS has two new versions of its managed containers and managed Kubernetes services, EKS Anywhere and ECS Anywhere, that can run on both Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. AWS confirmed that its new software will manage workloads running on other cloud providers. AWS does not like to play with other cloud services, however, its customers do, so they caved.
Google and Microsoft were late to the multicloud game too. When their customers demanded software management on multiple cloud infrastructures, they realized many used AWS. It was also a good way to make their customers happy and possibly more money.
AWS lacks support, though:
“It does not appear that ECS Anywhere and EKS Anywhere offer the same degree of support for multicloud deployments as Azure Arc or Google Anthos, which were designed to be user-friendly multicloud tools. And according to the ECS Anywhere launch blog post, ‘the supportability of ECS Anywhere scenarios at the time of general availability may be artificially limited due to other constraints.’”
That stinks for the moment, but give it awhile and the AWS team will offer more support as demand for service grows.
Whitney Grace, January 21, 2021
With Amazon Reviews, Look Beyond the Stars
January 14, 2021
We have covered Amazon’s persistent problem with fake reviews for products on its platform. Ars Technica discusses a slightly different issue in, “Amazon Still Hasn’t Fixed Its Problem with Bait-and-Switch Reviews.” Writer Timothy B. Lee describes his effort to find a good drone for his kids. A certain selection enjoyed thousands of five-star reviews—great! Many shoppers would stop there, hit “add to cart,” and be on their way. However, Lee actually checked out the text of the best reviews and discovered they were singing the praises of a certain brand of honey. Honey! How one would confuse the rich, golden sweetener with a flying head-bonker is beyond us. Lee writes:
“When I sorted the reviews by date, I saw that the most recent reviewers actually had bought a drone and they were overwhelmingly not giving it five stars. ‘Bought this for my Grandson,’ a customer wrote on December 26. ‘He played with it for 2 hours before it broke and is no longer working.’ He gave the drone one star. But the older reviews were for honey. Apparently, the manufacturer had tricked Amazon into displaying thousands of reviews for an unrelated product below its drone, helping the drone to unfairly rise to the top of Amazon’s search results. The story was similar for the second and third results in my drone search. Both had thousands of reviews with five-star averages. In both cases, many of the five-star reviews were obviously for other products—including a bottle of vodka, a bracelet, and a box of Christmas cards. In both cases, the most recent reviews were almost all negative reviews from customers who had actually bought the drones. One reviewer claimed that a drone had scratched their son’s face.”
Ay, Caramba! This sellers’ scam has been going on for some time now; we’re reminded Buzzfeed covered it over two years ago. We doubt Amazon will ever raise a finger to fix the problem—that would cost money, which they would prefer to avoid. As much as the company blusters about putting the customer first, it is really the bottom line at the top of its agenda.
Cynthia Murrell, January 14, 2021
What Has Amazon Caught? The Google Syndrome?
January 4, 2021
No, Google has not launched a virus infecting Amazon Web Services (although AWS has people capable of designing such a virus). Instead Google has infected AWS with its “shiny object syndrome” says Last Week In AWS in the article: “The Google Disease Afflicting AWS.”
Last Week In AWS refers to Google’s mind state as the “launch new service” mentality, where Google perpetually launches new projects, works on them for the headlines, then abandons them. Apparently it is the only way to advance in Google’s hierarchy. AWS, on the other hand, is starting a “launch new service” mentality when those new services should be features on preexisting projects.
AWS should be helping their customers, instead they are creating new and competing services. This mentality has harmed Google and will not do any favors for AWS. The majority of people agree:
“For a company that believes its team should Be Right a Lot, this is pretty clearly the wrong path—according to customers, analysts, random passersby, and employees with a penchant for honesty. It’s not good for anyone, and I firmly believe that you don’t Earn Trust from your customers by making even the most diligent cloud-watchers feel that the cloud is accelerating away from their ability to understand and contextualize what you’ve built.”
The article wonders why no one has pointed this out to AWS top brass. We do not know if anyone actually has, but common sense states that an employee must have reported the top heavy and poor customer service model. This common sense employee was probably reprimanded or fired for speaking the truth. Remember the child who said the emperor was naked?
Whitney Grace, January 4, 2021
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